Cision Blog: The new social media Bible

When the authors of the Associated Press Style Guide released its first edition in 1953, it was written on 60 pages of stapled-together paper and its originators probably couldn’t imagine a time when the guide would also need to include the acronym for “rolling on the ground laughing” or ROFL.

But almost 60 years later, the emergence of social media in the everyday lives of journalists has necessitated a response from the AP, whose stylebook is the go-to resource for everything from datelines to libel law.

The news service released its new social media guidelines to clarify its style on such common conundrums as “smart phone” (not smartphone), e-reader (not ereader) and giving the thumbs up on using “friend” as a verb. In all, 42 new entries were added to the style guide.

One big change announced in April was the AP’s stance on the phrase “Web site.” It should now always be “website” but referencing the “Web” should still always be capitalized. While the change might sound simple, it was a bone of contention among the 237 readers who responded to the AP’s solicitation for feedback.

While the stylebook is updated every year, I still have an old copy at my desk and decided to flip through to find some older entries that might now be obsolete. The entry for diskette (“a generic term that means floppy disk”) seems especially irrelevant but the entry for hacker (“In common usage, the term has evolved to mean one who uses computer skills to unlawfully penetrate proprietary computer systems”) almost seems unnecessary.

And the new guidelines will be especially helpful for journalists looking for specific procedures on sites like Facebook and Twitter. As crowdsourcing on social media sites becomes more and more popular, the news service has responded with its strategies for verifying sources.

It also clarified the use of acronyms and I have to admit, I’m having trouble thinking of a news story where BRB (Be Right Back) or G2G (Got to Go) will be used. But other entries such as app, click-throughs, unfriend, trending and widget seem especially helpful.

Five years ago, the acronym POS (Parent Over Shoulder) was confined to the vocabulary of teenagers warning their online friends. But now, it’s used so commonly that even journalists need to know its correct use and meaning.
Flipping through various editions of the style guide gives you an overview of trends throughout the years and its latest edition cements social media’s relevance in journalism today. Will you buy a copy of the style guide?...Cision Blog

Cision Blog: The 5 new features on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn that PR pros need to understand

If you feel like you’d pay closer attention to the ongoing evolution of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, if only you had the time, this post is for you. The triumvirate of key social networks in the U.S. has been hard at work rolling out new features over the past month. Here’s the executive summary, with links to insightful blog posts about each innovation.

1. Promoted Tweets. Twitter stirred up a lot of media coverage a few weeks ago when it introduced its first serious attempt at generating revenue in the form of “promoted tweets”, which allow companies to sponsor their tweets so that they rise to the top of users’ searches. The program is currently available only to a test group of companies that includes Starbucks, Virgin America and Best Buy.

Eventually, Promoted Tweets will also appear in users’ feeds even if the user didn’t perform a search and doesn’t follow the advertiser, according to the New York Times. Twitter was generally applauded for accompanying the move with an algorithm that takes into account 9 factors of “resonance” to determine whether the tweet is relevant to users. If not, the tweet loses its promoted status so that users won’t be interrupted with irrelevant tweets. Companies will pay based on the number of impressions the tweet receives, though Twitter hasn’t been very forthcoming about pricing, as Jeremy Schoemaker at Shoemoney points out in a recent post.

2. Facebook “Likes” on Web sites. At its F8 developer conference last week, Facebook announced a number of new features, most notably the ability for Web publishers to include a “Like” button with each post or article on their site (we’ve implemented it here at CisionBlog, see the bottom of this post). When you “Like” an article, it gets published to the news feeds of your friends on Facebook. This little feature has the potential to drive a lot of new traffic to your content. If you publish press releases or blog posts online, you should consider using it. To learn more, check out this excellent post on the feature’s significance from Chris Crum at WebProNews.

3. Facebook Insights enhancements. Facebook page administrators, app developers and Web site owners now have a new suite of reporting and visualization tools at their disposal for tracking the user engagement they generate through Facebook. The new Facebook Insights dashboard lets you track activity on pages, apps and external Web sites integrated with Facebook in one place for the first time, with a new API for mashing up this data with other analytics tools. Check out this video of Facebook developers discussing the changes at F8, or this comprehensive overview from Inside Facebook.

4. The ability to follow companies on LinkedIn. We’ve discussed here before that many professionals use LinkedIn as a sort of virtual Rolodex and not much else; in fact there is lots of great business intelligence being exchanged there every day (particularly in LinkedIn Answers discussion threads). Last week, LinkedIn introduced the ability for users to “follow” or track all changes at a company, including profile updates, new hires, open positions and promotions. The feature could prove to be a great career-building tool for PR pros. Andrew Rosen at SocialTimes outlines other potential uses here.

5. Embeddable tweets. Twitter also introduced a tool called Blackbird Pie that allows you to convert a link to an individual tweet to a snippet of HTML code that can be embedded in a blog post. Most bloggers take screenshots of tweets to paste into their posts instead, and will probably continue to do so as Twitter refines Blackbird Pie, which tends to spit out a fairly long bit of code that is not yet compatible with all content management systems. Due to poor reception, Twitter backpedaled a bit and referred to Blackbird Pie as more of a “hack”, as Andy Beal points out here on Marketing Pilgrim. Cision Blog

Cision Blog: Revisiting the Top 100 Social Media & Internet Marketing Bloggers

Back in January 2009, CisionBlog blogger Jay Krall compiled a list of Top 100 Social Media and Internet Marketing Bloggers based on unique visitors and inbound links. It got me thinking, what if Web metrics were used to compile a new list? Would the top 100 dramatically change? Cision’s recent partnership with Compete provided me with the data needed to conduct my experiment.

For this particular list, four Web audience metrics were chosen to weigh equally in this analysis: Average Unique Visitors per Month (available in CisionPoint), Average Page Views per Month per Unique Visitor, Average Time (seconds) per Month per Unique Visitor, and Average Visits per Month per Unique Visitor. Using Cision’s media database, I was able to find over 400 blogs covering social media, online marketing and the tech industry as a whole. From there, I drilled it down to the ones that primarily focused on social media and online marketing. Next, I ranked the blogs based on the four metrics provided by Compete. Here are the results. (Quick note: ladies are represented well on this list. Almost half of the top 50 are blogs either written by a woman or have at least one woman blogger.)

Disclaimer: a question we’ve addressed often on this blog and in many of our free Cision Webinars is, with all the metrics available for determining influence on the social Web, how can you determine which blogs really matter? Unfortunately there isn’t one metric that serves as a reliable indicator. As Jay noted in his last post, influence is subjective by nature and we’ve read a lot of great posts by bloggers who didn’t make the list. Some of them wield more influence in social media education endeavors outside of their blogs, such as conferences, Webinars, podcasts and white papers.

Top 100 Social Media & Internet Marketing Bloggers

1. Mashable
2. ignite social media
3. Problogger
4. ReadWriteWeb
5. MediaShift
6. Danny Brown
7. aimClear Blog
8. Seth Godin’s Blog
9. Social Media Today
10. Social Business
11. Ogilvy PR 360 Digital Influence Blog
12. HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog
13. Inside Facebook
14. ChrisBrogan.com
15. Small Business Search Marketing
16. digiday:DAILY
17. Dealer Refresh
18. Threeminds
19. MackCollier.com
20. Daily Blog Tips
21. Josh’s Unconventional Marketing Blog
22. Journalistics
23. MattFlies
24. Winning the Web
25. PR 2.0
26. Social Media Explorer
27. Convince & Convert
28. Marketing Pilgrim
29. Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang
30. CisionBlog
31. Conversation Marketing
32. Max Gladwell
33. PRBreakfastClub
34. The Social
35. The Profitable Podcast
36. Marketing Profs Daily Fix
37. Six Pixels of Seperation
38. A Shel of My Former Self
39. The Marketing Technology Blog
40. Personal Branding Blog
41. How to Change the World
42. .edu Guru
43. Peter Shankman
44. Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits can use Social Media
45. Sociable Blog
46. Being Peter Kim
47. The Altimeter by Charlene Li
48. SocialMouths
49. Conversation Agent
50. Old Media, New Tricks
51. davefleet.com
52. Altitude Branding
53. PR Squared
54. Scobleizer
55. Regular Geek
56. Creativity_Unbound
57. Logic + Emotion
58. FreshNetworks Blog
59. Lip-Sticking
60. SheGeeks
61. Internet Marketing with Matt Bacak
62. Buzz Marketing for Technology
63. PRSarahEvans
64. The Buzz Bin
65. The Marketing Eggspert
66. PR Communications
67. Successful Blog
68. Anil Dash’s Blog
69. Jacob Morgan
70. ChaseSagum.com
71. Twitterati
72. Global Neighbourhoods
73. bub.blicio.us
74. SearchFuel
75. Find and Convert
76. Social Media Optimization
77. Inside the Marketers Studio
78. The Social Path
79. The Social Media Marketing Blog
80. brentcsutoras
81. PR 2.0 Strategies
82. A. Fine Blog
83. Twittercism
84. Valley PR Blog
85. What’s Next Blog
86. MediaFuturist
87. The Proactive Report
88. Culture Buzz
89. Groundswell
90. Spark Minute
91. Marketing Nirvana
92. Capture the Conversation
93. One Degree
94. A Relationship Economy
95. Fast Wonder
96. Social Media Vision
97. ConverStations
98. Open Forum Blog
99. TwiTip
100. DygiScape
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